Awakening
by BagelsandBroadway
Summary: A one-shot about Johnny Cade's father and how the Cade family fell apart.


I silently grazed my fingers over the penny sized bullet hole in the beige peeling paint of the wall. I winced as tiny pieces of drywall crumbled to the floor, making the already noticeable hole larger.

"I'm really in for it now." I moaned to myself, placing my head in my hands. My pal, Frankie Rinaldi, stood next to me, his hands shoved in his pockets nervously, dark brown eyes wide with a mix of fear and excitement. I grasped his Remington so hard my knuckles had begun to turn a sickly shade of white, which no doubt matched the color of my shock struck face. "My old man's gonna kill me." I sunk down to the floor underneath the hole dramatically, dropping the now empty gun to the carpet next to me.

There was no doubt my old man had been different since he got back from the war in September. He had been in the Coast Guard at first, down in Jamaica and Haiti. After a while though, they shipped him and a few other guys down to Great Britain. We didn't see him or hear from him for over a year after that. Finally, on the day I turned thirteen, my dad sent a card and a fifty cent piece from England. He arrived back in Tulsa only a few weeks after the war ended, two years after I had turned thirteen. Although he didn't look any different from the day he left to join the Coast Guard, I could see in his pain-stricken face that he was changed. He had hit me only once before, when I was three, for trying to drink bleach. But when he came back, the more my older brother, Kevin, and I got in his way, the more he ragged on us.

"We just gotta cover it up." Frankie shrugged, trying his best to console me. I glared up at him in defeat. If it weren't for Frankie and his stupid pistol, we wouldn't be in this mess. He had nabbed the gun from his grandpa's collection, it was brand new. A slick silver color with a hand the size of my dad's wrist. It felt heavy when I picked it up, a .45 pistol that I had just fired in my own house.

"We can't do nothing Frankie, my old man's gonna be home any minute." I sighed, standing up and leaning against the hole. Yeah, that would work if I just stood there all day and night. I opened the door for Frankie, forcing him outside into the crisp November afternoon, his bike, a real good looking red Schwinn, stood outside. I admit, it was kind of dorky to be fifteen and not have either a driver's license or a truck, but Frankie and I had agreed that when we turned sixteen, we were going to buy a Chevy and fix it up ourselves. The idea seemed sort of childish, since after all, we had made the pact when we were just stupid twelve year olds cursing and smoking, trying to look cool outside of the record store in town, but we weren't backing out, even if we had to resort to hotwiring a car and just stealing it. Living in one of the poorest neighborhoods in all of Tulsa didn't exactly leave us at the top of the food chain at school. We needed our own car if we were going to get there before graduating.

"See you tomorrow, Doug." He called, gently placing the pistol in his back pocket as I handed it to him. I knew he was in a deeper hole than me though, Mr. Rinaldi had a leather belt that hurt like a bee sting. If he found out that Frankie took his grandfather's gun, Frankie wouldn't be sitting for a week.

My dad had been working at the poultry factory for two and a half months now. He hated every last second of it, which was why Kevin and I kept out of his way whenever he got home. He usually left around four or five in the morning and came back twelve hours later, sore, angry and tired. My mother would try to fix him dinner with whatever we had around, but sometimes it wasn't enough and either Kevin or I would go without dinner or my mother would be trying to cover up a black eye the next morning. The poultry industry was growing in the south, places like Georgia and Mississippi, but not in Oklahoma. Soon enough, he would be fired and would have to find yet another low paying job where he worked almost twelve hours a day and came home hollow looking. They always say that the last ones to come are the first to go.

So that evening when my dad came home, tired and sore from the day's work of sexing chickens, he laid down on our tethered living room couch, and I hid away in the room I shared with my seventeen year old brother. My brother worked too, odd hours for a part- time store clerk at the Quickee mart. I guess it was because he had to fit school in there too. He worked every day from four to six or seven, then came home and did piles of homework. At least he had his friend, David, working there with him. Frankie and I moved boxes into the storage room and the freezer on the weekends and during the summer. It was because my mother told me I couldn't get a real job until I was at least sixteen, so Kevin convinced his boss to let Frankie and I move boxes for a quarter an hour. It was good money, but not even close enough for a car. We had been saving since we were twelve and we only had eighty-seven dollars.

I sat in our tiny room for at least three hours, the silence coming from the rest of the house scaring me half to death. Had my father noticed the obviously evident hole right above our television? Or was he waiting until later to give me the belt which I obviously deserved. Over the past few weeks, I though some of the beatings I got almost every other night were unfair, sometimes I think he just hit me for no reason. But when he called me out into the living room, almost an hour before either my brother or mom would get home from work; I knew something about this beating was going to be different. The empty Acme beer cans that littered our living room floor were what gave me a hint.

"Doug." My father said, his voice sending chills down my spine. "Mind telling me where that hole came from?" I glanced above our television set at the bullet hole which now looked even bigger, probably from me leaning up against it. I sighed loudly before inhaling nervously. There was no way I could get out of this now.

"Frankie brought over his granddad's gun and I accidentally shot the wall." I admitted sheepishly, shoving my fists into my jean jacket pockets. I kicked at the floor a little with the already worn toe of my Cons; I had found them on the street on morning, barely used. I took them without feeling even the slightest bit bad. No one questioned where they came from, everybody at school just assumed I had stolen them. The story gave me an edge, so I didn't correct anybody when the obviously richer kids whispered behind my back about being a thief and a hood.

"Douglas Cade, get your ass in that room of yours and don't you come out 'till I'm done with you." I didn't argue with my father as I sulked back to my room, knowing he was going into his closet to get his hardest belt. I sat down on my bed, a mess of blankets and clothes. I didn't notice the two-by-four in my father's hands before it was too late to duck.

I took it like a man though, but silently cried my eyes out when he was done, his beer-tainted breath and heavy hands gone.

Drops of blood stained my Cons.

I climbed out the window and left.

I didn't go back home or to school the next day. I hung around in the deserted pet store a few miles away from my house with a couple of pop bottles I swiped from the Quickee mart. I finally worked up the courage to head to school the day after, no doubt Frankie was wondering where I had disappeared to.

"You get off easy?" Frankie asked me that morning in English, I shrugged, staring down at my shoes. Frankie might have noticed the blood too, but didn't say anything. I knew there was still blood in my dark brown, almost black, hair too. I hadn't washed my face or hair in two days, and I hadn't even had time to bandage up my head before bolting. It sucked, especially when my old hag of an Algebra teacher asked me what on earth happened to my head and face.

Even though I didn't start drinking until '46, the year my mother died, I already had that same bitter, jaded, rebellious glare my father had come home with from the war. My brother moved out that summer, leaving me with my father. I grew distant with Frankie; and eventually he took our eighty-eight dollars and spent it on an old Harley that he fixed up. He died in an accident near the farmhouse one night during our senior year. I knocked up Linda Ross that year, a few months after I had graduated. I wasn't soused, but I wasn't thinking straight either. Being my girlfriend of almost a year and a half, I figured we should finally get around and do it. She had our son nine months later, and we moved further into the city where I had just gotten a job driving cabs to the Tulsa airport and back.

It wasn't long before I realized I had turned into my old man. When my son died from a fire a few months after turning sixteen, I cried. I cried when I found out what happened, and I cried when I went to his funeral. Something I knew no one would ever do for me.

I didn't hate anyone more than I hated myself at the moment when I realized I was the cause of my son's death, of Frankie's death, and of my own death, three weeks after the funeral.

It wasn't anybody's fault but mine.


End file.
